Pod Insights Modern Wisdom Why Do Women Take Sexy Selfies? - Dr Khandis Blake About this episode Dr Blake is an Evolutionary Social Psychologist at the University of Melbourne whose research focuses on status seeking, the menstrual cycle & sexual politics.
It is no surprise that women try to enhance their beauty, put on makeup, wear high heels and sometimes take off some layers for photos. But what predicts beautification? Is it all a product of the patriarchy or is it something else? Just why are women making all this effort?
Expect to learn whether women condemn promiscuity more when they have sons, what predicts a high prevalence of sexy selfies, whether society has an incel problem, the relationship between makeup and female assertiveness, how income inequality motivates some very odd behaviour and much more...
Sponsors:
Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10)
Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout)
Extra Stuff:
Follow Khandis on Twitter - https://twitter.com/KhandisBlake
Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/
To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom
#women #dating #evolutionarypsychology
-
00:00 Intro
00:26 Why Do Women Take Sexy Selfies?
06:55 Predicting Increases in Sexy Selfie-Taking
16:25 How Income Equality Impacts Intra-sexual Competition
22:14 Do Sex Ratios Influence Beautification?
28:51 Causes of Conflict Between the Sexes
35:04 Should We Worry About the Future of the Dating Market?
49:37 Does the West Have an Incel Crisis?
1:02:57 Is it Easier for Men to Self-Improve than Women?
1:10:54 Dr Blake’s Background in Gender Studies
1:18:19 Where to Find Dr Blake
-
Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw
Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/
-
Get in touch in the comments below or head to...
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx
Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/
Transcript 13,634 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Sexualisation is not actually manifesting from this kind of patriarchal pressure where men force women to beautify. It's actually manifesting as a result of a state of the economy that has people want to strive to do better, to out-compete their peers, to keep up with the Joneses. It's linking beautification with status-seeking and not with the patriarchy.
0:25 Chris Williamson? Why do women take sexy selfies?
0:28 Speaker 00 Oh, we're starting at the big ones, the big questions. So, this has been something that's been really fascinating for me for a while, partly because I'm a woman, you know, and I've been through all of those teenage years in my twenties where beauty was really important to me. And then I've kind of passed that and whilst beauty still is important in your thirties as well, you know, you just see so many women taking these selfies and it seems to be so, so important to them. And one of the kind of strongest arguments about this, one of the most dominant arguments
1:10 Speaker 00 about this is basically that women really care about their appearance, they really care about beauty because of the patriarchy, you know, capital P. And the idea there is that gender oppression leads women to value their bodies more than they value their other qualities. And psychologists call that self-objectification, that's the kind of techie term for it. And, you know, I think there is some truth to that, there's certainly a bunch of people been talking about it for many years. But in my kind of opinion, when I first started looking at this topic of research, I thought that was doing a bit of a disservice to women. Because from what I could see, having kind of been in that world and having known many
1:53 Speaker 00 women in that world, there was something really uber-competitive about women engaging in sexy selfies and beautifying their appearance as well. Like, it didn't seem to me to be something that was done to women, but very much something that women were owning and using quite strategically. So...
2:18 Speaker 00 That's kind of the background of what had me start to look at that question and why I was so animated by it. Um. And we have found in a range of different studies now, um, that women take sexy selfies to to seek status. That this is a status-seeking thing, you know, they're interested in gaining status in social hierarchies. It can be a very agentic and assertive behaviour. Um. And that saying they're only doing it because they're pressed and the patriarchy tells them they have to is really kind of uh only showing a small part of the picture of that kind of motivation.
2:56 Chris Williamson? Are you suggesting that uh beautification and enhanced attractiveness and displays of attractiveness are one of the primary methods through which women can gain status?
3:08 Speaker 00 I wouldn't say it's a primary, well, would I say it's a primary method? Let me think about that. Um. Yeah, I think I probably would actually, yeah, it's definitely a big way. And part of that is, you know, part of that just has to do with our kind of cultural history, where for many women, even to this day, your survival, your kind of flourishing relies on you marrying well. Um. Because you can't necessarily hold much wealth for yourself. So in that case, looking attractive really helps because we know that men tend to prefer, all else being equal, a more beautiful partner to a less beautiful partner. I mean, I don't think we need to get up in arms about that. It's it's a kind of a pretty logical decision.
3:48 Speaker 00 Um. So partly, I think the the importance of seeking status through beauty comes from that place. Um. But then there's something else about it that's just unrelated to that dynamic as well, which is humans have this tendency to think highly of beautiful people. You know, more attractive people, they're more likely to get hired, they're more likely to get job offers. They have higher earning potential in general. It's something like ten to fifteen percent higher wages. Uh. We think that they're smarter, they're not, right? But we think that they are. People have this bias, we think they're smarter, we think they're generally good, we think they're competent.
4:26 Speaker 00 Um. And all of these kinds of stereotypes and biases we hold means that investing in your appearance can be quite a smart move.
4:35 Chris Williamson? Why is it the case that for women sexy selfies are a status seeking mechanism? If it's simply the case that this halo effect, pretty privilege goes across the board. And yet for men, we don't see, I certainly don't see as many sexy selfies from my guy mates as I do from my girl mates. Yeah.
4:54 Speaker 00 Totally. So there's a couple of things about that. The, the evidence that shows that we have these attractiveness biases, some of that evidence is sex specific. So some of it, it's stronger for women, right? So you see these effects manifest more for women than you do men, but not all of them. Um, you know, if you were going to do a blanket statement, I would probably say maybe a third of them are stronger amongst men. And then the other two thirds, there's no sex difference. So that you get the same effects for men as well.
5:23 Speaker 00 Um, I think there's kind of two things to say on why we see it more amongst women. One is we do have that context of women needing, you know, of women having in the past, having to rely on beauty to get ahead. Right? So there's that. But then the other thing is, um,
5:44 Speaker 00 men can tend to have other ways of, of achieving status, right? And part of that is historical and part of that is, um,
5:56 Speaker 00 that in most cultures, pretty much all countries, I mean, the vast majority of them, men earn more than women do. Earning is this really great way of producing status. Um, and if you look at what each sex is looking for in a mate, you find that every sex is, you know, both men and both women and, you know, people who don't identify as either care about mates that are kind. People generally want mates that are, um, intelligent, compassionate people. But as a blanket population level difference, men are more interested in mates that are more attractive. And women are more interested in mates that have higher status.
6:35 Speaker 00 So men have these other ways of, of achieving status that aren't necessarily as easy for women to achieve.
6:43 Chris Williamson? I suppose if you were to compare the number of car photos or watch photos that guys upload online.
6:49 Speaker 00 Or big animal photos. Don't forget about those, you know, hugging a tiger.
6:52 Chris Williamson? Yep. And that as well. Um, what are some of the things that you discovered that can predict increases in sexy selfieing?
7:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, so one, surprisingly, is a economic condition of economic inequality. So, one of the things we did was we, so I run a big data platform, right? I'm really, I really love big data. I think it's fun and exciting and yada, yada, yada. So I run this platform and we have three billion geolocated tweets that we designed this algorithm to geolocate. They span ten years and we use it to try and understand trajectories of attitudes and kind of cultural trends. And one of the first things we did with that was look at sexy selfies, right? So by, by being able to take this kind of big geolocated social media data,
7:44 Speaker 00 and we have data for every country in the world, and look at the prevalence of something like sexy selfies across these different countries and regions, we can then link that data to population level data about that country. Things like its degree of gender inequality, right? Its degree of income inequality, its sex ratio, which is, you know, the ratio of men to women, which is this indicator of reproductive competition, you know? Income, education, all these kinds of things. So we did this investigation and we found that sexy selfies happen a lot more in environments that are economically unequal.
8:28 Speaker 00 We also looked at gender inequality and we found that, consistent with that dominant argument, we did find a gender inequality effect, meaning that sexy selfies happened more in places that were gender unequal.
8:41 Chris Williamson? What, just for the people that don't know, what does gender inequality mean?
8:45 Speaker 00 That would be like, how much more men earn than women earn? How many more parliamentary seats men hold? Like, are men considered leaders in society more than women and do they have more power, right? So you could kind of think of that gender inequality metric as being an indication of the power of the patriarchy, right? High gender inequality, stronger patriarchal power. And consistent with that argument, we initially found this gender inequality effect, right? But once you put income inequality into that analysis, the gender inequality effect disappears. And that may sound a little like...
9:30 Speaker 00 A bit of kind of academic statistic mumbo jumbo, what's the real difference? It's all inequalities, but it's actually really important. Because what it's doing is saying that sexualisation is not actually, in these data at least, manifesting from this kind of patriarchal pressure where men force women to beautify. It's actually manifesting as a result of a state of the economy that has people want to strive to do better, to outcompete their peers, to keep up with the Joneses. Right? So it's linking beautification with status seeking and not with patriarchy.
10:09 Chris Williamson? Wow, okay. Why? Why do you think that that's the case?
10:14 Speaker 00 Yes. Yeah. So I think that
10:22 Speaker 00 in evolutionary psychology, in gender psychology, you know, in academia in general, we tend to underestimate the importance of status seeking amongst women. There is a quite dominant discourse about why status is important for men. You know, we talked about a little of it, like status is important for men to seek mates. Obviously, status is important for money. Money is important for everybody and money is important for reproduction as well. So, you know, we tend to know that men are interested in status, but there's been this disagreement and this kind of neglect of the importance of status for women.
11:04 Chris Williamson? I think that there's definitely an element of that whereby any discussion of the more vicious sides of femininity are kind of swept under the rug. That's not really something that women do. There is a little bit of a culture at the moment that masculinity is not something that should be pushed too much further forward, which means the subtext of that, anything which is more feminine should be something which is promoted. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's one of the reasons why, I mean, I've had Joyce Benenson, Tanya Reynolds, Candice, Christina Geranti, a bunch of different people on the show recently, all of whom are saying the same thing, which is, and for me, female intersexual competition is way, way more interesting than male intersexual competition because it's so much,
11:49 Chris Williamson? you guys are just like vicious and cunning and nuanced and brutal. It's great.
11:55 Speaker 00 But very nice on top of all of that, on the outside.
11:58 Chris Williamson? Sexy selfies as well, so you know, it's great.
12:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, it fascinates me as well, you know, and I um, I think, you know, the this idea that women aren't ferociously competitive is just plain wrong. We just, we compete in a different way than what people have traditionally considered to be competition. Status gives us different benefits. It doesn't mean it's not really critically important, though.
12:28 Chris Williamson? Okay, so, status amongst women is important.
12:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:32 Chris Williamson? Economic inequality predicts sexy selfieing. Women are using beautification as a tool to drag themselves out of a situation in which there is increased economic inequality. Let me bro signs, presumably because they can see where they could get to, because they're exposed to the heights of good economics, but they are also exposed to what happens if they slip a couple of rungs down the ladder. And that is a motivation to say, you do not want to go down there, you do want to go up there. What are the tools that I have at my disposal? I have a camera and a phone and an Instagram account. Allow the selfies to occur.
13:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, you nailed it. That's basically exactly what we argue is happening. Now, I think there's a one point to make about that, which is that effect of economic inequality on wanting to seek status is something that you see above both men and women, right? So this is a pop, amongst everybody, even rich people in economically unequal environments get more worried about status, presumably because they're worried about losing status. Right? So economic inequality makes everyone across the board want to seek status. But what you're seeing amongst women, and particularly women for whom beauty is a form of capital, right? Is that they invest in that to try and get ahead. I think that um there's two kind of main pathways that could help them get ahead.
13:57 Speaker 00 One is the more obvious one of they could use it to attract a high quality mate, right? Or in this case, that would be a rich, well off man in this economically unequal world. Um but the other is all those other biases and uh stereotypes that we discussed about why beauty benefits people is that they could use it to build social capital, right? People want to be friends with beautiful people. It allows you to move in the right social circles. We know that moving in the right social circles can have really important ramifications. It can help you build uh networks. It can, and these can be same sex and other sex networks. Um it can also have you create advocates and protectors around you and
14:41 Speaker 00 and you know, none of these effects are going to be sledgehammer effects where all of a sudden I put on lipstick and like 10 people are running to me going, how can I advocate for your interests, Candace? Um I mean, this is not that strong, right? So got to remember that this is, this is a subtle kind of finding. Um it doesn't mean it's not meaningful though, and it doesn't mean that uh it's not strategic and savvy to invest in that.
15:07 Chris Williamson? Yeah, these one percents all the way up. I tell you what, I'd love to look at the, I'd love to get David Putz in to get him to do his study about male vocal pitch. And I wonder if men speak in a lower vocal tone in areas of higher economic inequality. I bet they do.
15:25 Speaker 00 I wonder if they do. And amongst beautiful women as well. Why do I feel like he may have looked at that already? I don't know if he looked at the amongst beautiful women thing, but you'd expect that some kind of environment that is increasing mate competition
15:39 Speaker 00 could result in that kind of change, right?
15:41 Chris Williamson? Wild shit happening. He told me this story about when he was at uni, before he'd even started doing his big studies on vocal pitch and stuff. And apparently he was stood in the queue at the supermarket and he could hear these two guys behind him and they were speaking. And he thought he was going to turn around and find two jazz singers or two sort of old guys that were smoking cigars or something because their voices were so low and he turned around to find a pretty attractive girl. In between him and two guys that were in their 25s.
16:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, right.
16:15 Chris Williamson? It was a case that these two guys were trying to signal, auditorily signal dominance to this girl. Look at how big my vocal folds are. Look at how long my voice goes. Okay, so that's how income inequality impacts sexy selfies. But it also, it has to impact female, intrasexual competition in other ways as well. What else have you learned?
16:37 Speaker 00 Okay, so we have looked at sexualization and what else have we looked at?
16:42 Chris Williamson? Cosmetic use?
16:44 Speaker 00 Cosmetic use, yeah, we have. So one of the things that we were keen on in that study was not just showing the effect online, right? Because social media is its own world and we assume that what's happening online reflects what's happening offline. But it's always good to kind of test that assumption. So we looked at women's purchasing of beauty products as well amongst all the states in the US, where we had really good kind of data on that. And then we looked at beauty salons and I think it was, yeah, it was beauty salons and cosmetics. So these two other kind of indicators. And we also found that in cities in the US that were more economically unequal, in counties in the US that were more economically unequal,
17:27 Speaker 00 that people were spending more money in women's beauty salons and more money on women's cosmetics and women's beauty products. So we kind of replicate the effect there as well, consistent with physical appearance and beauty becoming really important in these areas.
17:41 Chris Williamson? And you saw that beautification increased assertiveness too?
17:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, so a lot of my work is on beauty, you know.
17:51 Speaker 00 It's been, it's been a kind of long, it's been a long journey for me. Partly, I think it's because I grew up in a family where my mum had been a fashion model. My dad had been a fashion model and then my brother was a fashion model, right? I was not a fashion model, had no resentment about it, of course, I'm completely over it. However, right, it's had me become really interested in beauty. And so we did these other studies where we had women come into the lab and we prepped them for this, right? So we gave them all these instructions and we told them they either had to come into the lab, bringing everything they would wear if they were going to go on a hot date. Makeup, hair. Tools.
18:36 Chris Williamson? What tools are women bringing? Are they bringing like a fucking power drill or something? What have they got with them?
18:42 Speaker 00 Uh, curling irons, straighteners.
18:44 Chris Williamson? Oh, I see. Beautification tools.
18:47 Speaker 00 Beautification tools.
18:48 Chris Williamson? Not DIY tools. Right.
18:50 Speaker 00 Oh, no.
18:50 Chris Williamson? It was a shame.
18:51 Speaker 00 Um, so, and we were like, okay, so if you've got a hot date you need to date, you can leave them at our office for the morning. But we're like, you have to bring these things in. You can't not bring them in. If you don't bring them in, you can't do the experiment. So they either had to come in bringing all the hot date stuff, or they had to come in bringing, spending time at home with mates, stuff, right? Um, and then they came into the lab and we gave them half an hour or 20 minutes to get ready in preparation for the hot date or the hanging out with friends. We gave them a cubicle and it was all locked and a mirror, full length mirror. We also gave them additional makeup, should they not have had a lot of money for makeup, but secretly
19:31 Speaker 00 super wanted red lipstick. We gave them stuff. We said, you didn't have to use it. It's just there in case you would do it. But we emphasized, you've got to do what you would actually do for a hot date. Don't do what you think we want you to do. Do what you would do. Then they came out of the, uh, came out of that room and we did these experimental tests on them to see whether they were, uh, feeling more assertive after doing that. So we did, um, what's called a kind of self-report test where we just ask them explicit questions on a computer monitor. It's all done privately, but we might ask them, um, how much get up and go they feel like they have, how assertive they feel they are, how, uh,
20:13 Speaker 00 you know, how interested they would be in promoting themselves, that kind of thing. But then we also do these implicit tests and these are computerized tests that look to the participant like they're measuring word associations and reaction times. So it literally looks like you're staring at a computer screen, words flash up on a screen and you have to press a button to categorize that word into its. Most relevant category. Um, and we had categories related to assertiveness, right? And agency, which is this assertiveness related concept. Um, and in height, so high assertiveness and low assertiveness. And then these words flash up on the screen like go getter.
20:58 Speaker 00 You'd put go getter in the assertiveness category. And then other words flash up on the screen like lazy. And you'd categorize lazy into the non assertiveness category. Um, and all that's well and good. That's really just to train people that they know what the task does. But then we have their name flash up on the screen. And we have the word me flash up on the screen. And they have to do this in split seconds and they have to go, oh. And they have to categorize their name as high assertiveness or low assertiveness. And we do this hundreds of times to make the test, you know, statistically valid. And then we're able to use that as this other indicator of assertiveness. You know, that on the implicit level. And these implicit tests are good because a lot of research has shown you can't fake them.
21:41 Speaker 00 Right? You can't tell people what they want to hear. You just have to react kind of intuitively. Um, and after running this study, we found that women who were in the hot date condition, who'd had to put on the clothes and put on the makeup and do whatever they were doing for a hot date, uh, felt more assertive. They rated themselves as more assertive. They were implicitly more assertive. Um, and that was this other indicator that this kind of strategic beauty strategy can leave women feeling more assertive as well.
22:14 Chris Williamson? When it comes to thinking about all of this, one of the things that you haven't, you, you mentioned earlier on about the sex ratio. Have you looked at the proliferation of beautification and sexy selfies in connection with what the local ecology sex ratio is?
22:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, we did look at it in terms of sex ratio and we've looked at this, um, twice. So the first time we looked at it alongside that sexy selfie study. And we didn't find an effect there. So it didn't seem to matter what the sex ratio was, whether there were more men in the environment or more women in the environment. Um, just reliably, there was, there was just not, it just didn't matter. Um, and then we, uh, we also did an experimental study where we had participants, um.
23:02 Speaker 00 Do an online experiment where we primed them for different sex ratios. And how we did that is we, I think this was people in the US signed up to do the study. We found out where they lived, they gave us their county, right? And then we used that information to automatically create an infographic, like a mini poster, right? Kind of the thought that you would see your government produce about maybe how much men compared to women and why we should readdress gender inequality. We had this poster and the poster talked about the number of men versus women in their environment. And we did kitschy things like talk about the number of fish in the sea.
23:44 Speaker 00 And then we wrote fake news articles where people were complaining about there being a man drought or a woman drought. And we gave fake statistics about there being five, only five, you know, five men available for every one woman or the opposite way around. Basically, we did all these different manipulations to give people the impression that their environment was a good dating environment, right? Lots of opportunity or a poor dating environment, lots of competition. And then we measured women's interest in physical appearance and using physical appearance to get ahead.
24:29 Speaker 00 And we found no effect there either.
24:30 Chris Williamson? Wow, I would not have predicted that, given all of the stuff that sex ratio hypothesis would predict, things to do with short-term mating, fewer dates before sex, more, all of that stuff. I don't know why that wouldn't cross over into the digital realm. I'm going to guess that that's why you probably had another crack at it to see if there was something in there, because it makes so much sense before you actually get into the data.
24:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, we we thought the same thing. I was really surprised. Um, and the more I thought about it, though, and the more I looked into it, I came up with some potential reasons why we may not have found that effect. Um, one of them is that the sex ratio literature mainly looks at sex ratio at a population level. It's very rare that it's experimentally manipulated, right? So usually what you do is you actually take the real sex ratio in a place and then look at real outcomes in a place. Um, and that's well and good, and that has some strengths, but it leaves open, that kind of correlational analysis leaves open the possibility that there is some other predictor that is not being measured that could account for that finding.
25:38 Speaker 00 Um, an experimental test is really the kind of strongest test you can do of trying to find the relationship between something and and very few studies have have looked at sex ratio experiments. So that was one thing. But then the other thing is, you know, these sex ratio effects tend to be stronger amongst men than they do amongst women. Um, and what I mean by that is the sex ratio tends to affect male behaviour more than it does female behaviour. And I wonder if that's, I think that may have to do with this biological trade off between quality and quantity. Right? So when people are interested in,
26:19 Speaker 00 well, not really when people are interested, because these kind of motivations happen in the background, but that, you know, the motivation to, um, to mate, right? For a male is is benefited by, in a lot of ways, by quantity, right? There's no kind of cap for male reproductive success. So in one framework, you know, from one point of view, is a male is able to go and just kind of sleep with as many women as possible. Right? Some of them are going to get pregnant. Um, and if he if he sleeps with a hundred women, multiple of those women get pregnant, that's going to be a more of a benefit to his reproductive success than finding one super awesome, really high quality woman and, uh, just sleeping with her.
27:04 Speaker 00 And I'm talking purely numbers, right? Obviously, there's a lot more complex things going on. I'm not saying all men do that or that they should do that, but from a numbers perspective, that's what's going to benefit male reproductive success. From the female perspective, it's very different. Having sex with multiple men is not going to increase your reproductive success necessarily. You're limited by the costs of pregnancy, lactation, you know, that's, that's, that can take nine, 10, 11, 12, two years, right? So quantity is not necessarily the important thing there. The important thing is quality. So the operational sex ratio, that is an indication of quantity, right?
27:45 Speaker 00 The number of men or the number of women you have available. And I, I think that we may find these lesser effects amongst women because that quantity distinction is, is just not so relevant.
27:56 Chris Williamson? That's interesting.
27:57 Speaker 00 My thought, anyway.
27:57 Chris Williamson? Yeah, would it not be the case that in an area that has more men, there is a greater chance of you finding a high quality man? Let's say that there are 10 men out of every 100 that you would be prepared to get into a relationship with, but now there's a thousand men. Oh, well, now there's a hundred men that I would be prepared to get into a relationship with. I have no idea how that would affect behaviour. I can see why, given that men are playing a numbers game and women are playing a quality game, a manipulation of the numbers in the local ecology in terms of sex ratio would result in men adjusting their behaviour more than women. But fundamentally, the pool of quality men is impacted by the volume of men also. And
28:42 Chris Williamson? given that women are more picky, maybe that compensates in some sort of a way as well. It's, it is very, very interesting. One of my other favourite things that I saw you look at was social inequalities affecting conflict between the sexes. And this is something that I've been pretty obsessed with, this sort of mating crisis that's occurring at the moment, the difficulties that poorer men and richer women are having. What did you find in these models?
29:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, so this was, I think what you're talking about is the simulation study that we ran. So this was a study that I did with my collaborators, Rob Brooks and Lutz from Aage. And Lutz is an excellent modeler. And he, one of the things that he does is run these simulation studies. So for those who are unfamiliar with it, a simulation study is purely a kind of a mathematical,
29:41 Speaker 00 hypothetical, right? So what you do is you put people in that you, they're not, they're not people, right? So you, you mathematically create actors in a hypothetical environment. And then you can assign those actors a particular property, right? Like wealth. And then you can assign the environment a particular property. And in this case, we assigned those actors incomes, so wealth, right? And then we manipulated it to create inequality in that environment, both in terms of income inequality, just generally, some people were really rich, some people were really poor, some actors. And then gender inequality.
30:25 Speaker 00 So actors that we assigned to be female, less than actors we assigned to be male, or vice versa. And we manipulated that across a number of different dimensions. So you have a lot of, a lot of income inequality, just a little bit of income inequality, a lot of gender inequality, or maybe you've got perfect gender equality, or even the reverse, where you see women earn more than men. So we played around with all these different metrics. And then what you do in that simulation is you basically kind of press go. And iteratively over, I think we did a hundred simulation, I think we had a million individuals and a hundred simulations.
31:07 Speaker 00 You can measure a particular behaviour in that environment and see how those metrics affect that behaviour. So we were interested in pairing success, which we, we kind of just.
31:23 Speaker 00 And we're interested in pairing success under hypergony, right? So hypergony is this general rule that you see across pretty much all human societies, where women tend to marry up.
31:34 Chris Williamson? You call it hypergony, but other people call it hypergamy. What's the difference between those two?
31:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, so that kind of used interchangeably. Hypergony is, is women, you know, gony, women marrying up. Hypergamy is, oh, sorry, hypergony is just women kind of pairing up. Gamy more has to do with marrying up. So they kind of, they kind of mean the same thing, but people talk about them in different contexts.
32:02 Chris Williamson? Okay.
32:02 Speaker 00 Yeah. Um, so we use this simulation model to try and understand what was the success of pairing for male actors versus female actors in this environment, depending on what they earned and what other people earned. Um, and the, it was a complicated paper, but there was some really key two takeaway points. One takeaway point is there are consistently these groups in, in, in society uh, that are disadvantaged in terms of pairing success. And um, it doesn't matter if individuals in these groups are lovely, kind individuals.
32:44 Speaker 00 Uh, pairing success will be harder for them based on the economy in society. And those two groups of people, the first is poorer men. Probably no surprises there and we can talk about that. But the second is rich women. And that one usually people do find quite surprising. Um, and what we see is that those two groups do quite badly at pairing when uh, there is.
33:14 Speaker 00 Any form of gender equality, right, those two, those two groups do worse. When there is gender inequality, so if you kind of think how the status quo used to be, those two groups do better. And when there is income inequality, those two groups, especially men, do even worse than they were going to do before.
33:34 Chris Williamson? Hmm. So I understand the first two. I understand why in an environment that has relative gender equality, if women, women on average want to date a man that's as rich or richer than they are, if there is an ever decreasing pool of men that are across and above from them, they've got the tall girl problem, right? There are fewer and fewer men that they can date.
33:56 Speaker 00 Exactly.
33:57 Chris Williamson? I understand how the reverse of that would mean that men, even poor men, are doing better than women because some of those women on average are just generally poorer overall. So it gives men a stepping stone. It gives them a raise up, which makes it easier for poor men to be that hypergamous sort of above and across male to women, even if it's lower down women. The income inequality thing, I don't understand at all, and I need you to explain it.
34:24 Speaker 00 Yeah. So it's kind of like what we're talking about with those sexy selfies, right? And in those economically unequal environments, people can see the benefits of perhaps delaying pairing now by waiting to pair with an individual of higher status later. And what that means is you've got this kind of incentive operating in that marketplace that is, when mating is hypergamous, is just making things worse.
34:58 Chris Williamson? Hmm. So I mean, this is the, the fundamental quandary that I've been playing around with for the last year and a half or so. Given the fact at the moment that the trends suggest two women for every one man completing a full year US college degree by 2030, men are dropping out of the US labour force at 0.1% per month since the 1950s, and it's going to dip to 65% labour force participation by 2050. 50.1% of women childless by 30, 45% of 22 to 44 year old prime working age women will be single by 2040, according to, I think it was Reuters or somebody like that.
35:39 Chris Williamson? What do you, as a woman who is successful and has a PhD and all the rest of it, what do you see in the future as a potentially useful way to frame this? Whether it be conversation with the public or potential policy implications, or just like cultural interventions and technologies like mimetic interventions that we can do to try and make this easier? Because it sucks for women that, given the fact they've only just reached educational and employment parity, that they're now basically facing a world where for every pound extra that they earn, their dating prospects get worse. For every degree that they get, they're finding it harder to get married.
36:22 Chris Williamson? And also, men being forgotten and alone, retreating into porn and video games at rates greater than ever before. If one sex loses, both sexes lose, right? And as far as I can see, sexlessness is increasing amongst men. I'm sure you've seen the stats, about tripled since 2008 to 2018, blah, blah. It's not good for anybody at the moment, right? And yet, saying, "Women, have you considered being a little bit less educated or economically independent? It'll make your dating prospects better." Not a campaign that is going to be particularly successful for any politician to run on.
36:56 Speaker 00 Right.
36:57 Chris Williamson? You must have considered this. You must have considered this current sort of cultural challenge that we face, given the ground truth of hypergamy. So what do you think?
37:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I think I tend to be a little less worried about the future, in all honesty. I don't doubt those statistics that you've said, but I think that, you know, my understanding of the way that these dynamics play out is it's always an arms race, right? So each sex is kind of competing to do the best that they can in the environment that they are in. And we're very plastic, you know, we're very phenotypically plastic. We respond, we alter our behaviour to suit our environment, we adapt. And there are some big questions about how fast we adapt, but I think in a lot of these kinds of, in this particular discussion, I think that people are just going to find a way.
37:53 Speaker 00 You know, that pressure to, that pressure to mate is such a strong one. I think people are going to find a way to do it. Now, my...
38:06 Speaker 00 You know what I've often said to women when I talk to women in this position, and it usually tends to be women who are a little more educated, who are then shocked that they're at a disadvantage, right? They're just, they're like, well, that was my experience, but everybody just told me that I was making things up or that I was just not seeing the people that are available. And I'm like, well, no, you are statistically at a disadvantage. So the, the one thing is I think hypergony may relax to some extent, and it tends to have done so in terms of education. So what you are finding is that as women are getting more educated, their preferences for men who are more educated than themselves have started to relax. The income one is still a strong one. Um, but it's hard to test the strengths for that
38:51 Speaker 00 whilst we still have gender inequality in income, right? Because whilst there is gender inequality in income, there is always going to be an incentive, if you're a woman, to pair with a man who is richer than you. That incentive will always exist. So I think that we're going to continue to see that degree of hypergony in, in terms of income continue. Now, for um, men, and particularly for these, these poorer men who are in this worst prospect, it's a really tough one, right? I, I...
39:24 Speaker 00 Making that kind of argument of, well, we should try and have women be less educated is just not going to work, right? And particularly doing it in a way that you seem resentful and, and aggressive and, and anti-woman is not going to appeal to any women that you might want to attract. But at the same time, to then ignore this group of men and say, oh, well, you should just toughen up or, and don't complain about it, is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Um, and one of the things that we have kind of advocated for and tried to speak about is that we need to find a way to support these young men without just telling them that what they're seeing in the market is inaccurate.
40:06 Speaker 00 Um, or that because men in general tend to receive lots of benefits, that their gripes and their issues are something that we should ignore.
40:15 Speaker 00 How we do that in reality is a tricky question. One, this is a bit of an indirect approach is one is, you know, income inequality is something we consistently come back to being a problem. One is we could try and challenge income inequality. I authentically think that would make a really big difference, particularly amongst men's competition with other men, and that would help these these worse off individuals. Another indirect kind of pathway is, you know, maybe we work with those men to give them something else that they can offer to a romantic relationship that's not as important as income. Maybe we train them in being excellent parents. I mean, I know that seems like a bit of an odd thing to say, but, you know, if women
40:56 Speaker 00 are looking for, at a population level, taking care of their resources, right? And then wanting to be able to pair with someone who can be a good parent. If these men are really finding it difficult to handle that resource issue because they're disadvantaged in particular ways, or maybe they just don't have interest to go and be a stockbroker, they just want to do something else, which is completely legitimate. Maybe we find them a way that they can advertise their prowess as parents, you know, and we can invest in that way. I mean, these are some potential things.
41:26 Chris Williamson? Absolutely. I mean, I've played with a bunch of these solutions. I'm trying to come up with them. Pedestalizing motherhood and fatherhood is definitely one of them, because it takes, it it steps outside of this existing sort of hypergamous relationship and takes us into this sort of more familial thing, a familial setting in which characteristics like kindness, attentiveness, humour, goodwill, grit, determination, conscientiousness, that's not being driven toward a capitalist end, all of those are able to come out, right? In a really good, in a really good way. However, it it is currently very low status to be a stay at home dad. I mean, it's not exactly pedestalized to be a stay at home mum, but it's definitely not pedestalized to be a stay at home dad.
42:09 Chris Williamson? So I I think that that may be a little bit of an uphill battle, although it's not something that I would be like too averse to seeing. Totally right. Trying to claw back women's recently achieved parity in education and employment is not even going to begin getting anywhere. Raising up men, I really don't know what that means, although I would love to do it. I speak to guys, everybody that's listening to this podcast that is a guy is already outside of that bucket of people. They've already, they're super agentic, they've got sovereignty, they're trying to improve themselves. They can consume it 45 minutes into a conversation about very complex gender dynamics, right? Like they know what they're doing. It's the
42:53 Chris Williamson? group that aren't, and oddly, that's the strange thing, that the people that would benefit most from listening to podcasts like this one are the people that aren't listening to it, which is a little bit unfortunate. One of the things that I am, I don't know whether it's hopeful or not for, is trying to encourage both men and women to not see each other as adversaries anymore. I think that trying to have a collaborative conversation between the two sexes would make things a lot easier. I think that another stat, which I picked up last year from Seth Stephens Davidowitz's book, Don't Trust Your Gut,
43:34 Chris Williamson? is a man who works in hospitality and earns $300,000 a year is the same level of attractiveness as a firefighter or a lawyer that earns $60,000 a year. So basically, there is a $240,000 disparity because status, especially from employment, can be conveyed in more ways than just your monetary contribution. Now, the problem is, in relationships where the woman is the primary breadwinner, they're twice as or 50% more likely to end in divorce. And if the woman contributes more than 80% of the household income, they're twice as likely to end in divorce. Women are roughly three times more likely than men to say that they would value the resource acquisition of their partner, because men just don't
44:17 Chris Williamson? care about that from a partner, however, women do. So I don't know. One thing that Seth didn't look at is, yes, men are able to switch job titles and become more attractive without having to earn necessarily any more money. But he didn't work out what happens if your wife earns a hundred grand and you go from 300 to 60. I think that crossing that, that income threshold is actually going to be kind of like a floor, a hard floor, that if you fall through, you're going to start to see some weird externalities, no matter how sexy you look in your firefighter's outfit. So.
44:51 Speaker 00 I absolutely agree with you on that one.
44:54 Chris Williamson? It's an interesting one.
44:55 Speaker 00 You know, another thing that I I think that we need to pay attention to is um the
45:06 Speaker 00 the ramifications that these mating market conditions can have at a at a societal level as well. Right. So we need to be, let's take the the poor men situation, right. So we need to be aware of the situation for those individuals, right. What it is like for those individuals faced in that kind of market. We need to be aware of things like um you know, amongst the incel population, for example, who are are often associated with this group of, well, who are self proclaimed disadvantaged in the mating market. One of the things we see in that particular subpopulation is huge rates of mental health problems. Right. Huge rates of neuro neurodivergence, autism, depression, anxiety, that are
45:49 Speaker 00 you you know, double the rates even more of what we would see amongst the usual population.
45:54 Chris Williamson? Just to put it out there, we're not suggesting that not having sex causes you to be autistic. We're suggesting that a lot of people that are autistic and neurodivergent tend to be incels. Yeah.
46:02 Speaker 00 Yes, that's right. Yep. Um. So you know, we need to be sensitive and aware of tho- those kinds of barriers as well. And I think it can be easy to just go well, it's sex, whatever, like, we should be focusing on people's uh uh on other fundamental life motivations. But for many, many people, sex is very, very, very important to them. And not just very important at a hedonistic, I like getting my rocks off kind of way. Important in terms of who I value myself to be, my overall, my self worth, my, my, you know, my one of the things that motivates me to be living and feel like I am really.
46:43 Chris Williamson? Especially as a man, my masculine validity. Yes.
46:46 Speaker 00 Right. And I I think for far too long now, we have just ignored that as something that is deserving of time and attention. Um. But so that would be the first thing, i- is the importance of what it's like for those individuals. The other thing is the massive ramifications that it can have for international security when you start to mess with mating market dynamics. Right. And uh what that can cause for the prevalence of war, what that can cause for the prevalence of uh increased violence, theft, property crimes in general. Um. And
47:24 Speaker 00 Valerie Hudson, who is a political scientist in Texas A&M, has done a lot of work on this. And so has Rose McDermott, who's over at Brown. And they have shown that these mating market obstructions, where it's very hard for young men to marry, particularly in areas that are polygynous, right? So that one man has many wives and what that does is favour rich men who can afford many wives. It means that, I think, in Afghanistan right now, the rate of buying a wife, because it's that kind of bride price environment, you have to buy a wife. The rate of buying a wife is so expensive that only one son in each family, unless they're very rich, will ever be able to afford it.
48:08 Speaker 00 And all of the other sons, and these are environments which favour sons, so people tend to have more sons than daughters, all of the other sons will never marry. They just have to work to make sure that the eldest son can marry. I mean, imagine being one of those guys, right? You're never going to find a wife, you're never going to earn enough money to find a wife. Your elder brother, if you give him all your money, will find a wife. But, and that's what your family culture has to do. Now, then imagine a group like the Taliban comes along, and I'm simplifying a little, but not that much. A group like the Taliban comes along and says, "We need to get women out of education. We need to, I'll give you money, it will be religiously righteous, and we're going to get women out of education, and we're going to give you a wife
48:52 Speaker 00 if you join our insurgency and join our cause." And all of a sudden, in these environments, you have these men presented with completely bleak mating market prospects, and then presented with a group that tells them, "We'll get girls out of education", which for these uneducated men is a no-brainer. Why would you want girls being uneducated if you're an uneducated man and you know that educated women won't be interested in you? Then they tell you, "We'll give you a job and we'll give you money", right? Okay, well, that's a no-brainer. And, you know, part of these dynamics is they're fueling these very, very problematic international security dilemmas to do with warfare, to do with terrorism, to do with violence. And then we kind of, we ignore that structural consequence as well.
49:37 Chris Williamson? Wasn't there something in medieval Portugal where the first son, there was so few women, sex ratio was was split in a particular way that the first son was the only one that could get a wife, or maybe maybe it was a gerontocracy, or maybe there was some barons that had captured all of the hot young women or something, and they just shipped all of the other younger sons. First son, fantastic, you're laughing, you get family and wife. All of the other sons, what they did in order to be a pressure release valve for this latent sexual frustration, was they sent them off on galleon ships, and they said, go explore the new world,
50:18 Chris Williamson? you can go be pirates of the sea, you can go do all of this stuff. So they literally exported every man that wasn't the first son, in a desperate attempt to try and tune down this young male syndrome. So, okay, we've spoken about what's happening in countries where the, no matter what you think about the West, the gender inequality is worse, right? It's not as bad over here as it is over there. Do you think that the West has an incel problem, in terms of societal stability and security?
50:50 Speaker 00 I think the world has an incel problem. The, I don't, I don't, I'm giving you my intuition on this, because there's very poor quality data on it, but my intuition on it is that
51:05 Speaker 00 what we're talking to, what we're calling incels in the West, is prevalent in all different environments. We just may not use that term, and in those environments, they may not be vocal on English social media, and use hashtags to do with incels. But that underlying sentiment of disgruntled, aggrieved, young men who have poor prospects of finding a date, and the likelihood of those men engaging in kind of societal disruption, I think is evident everywhere.
51:33 Chris Williamson? Okay, so I have a theory. This is the first time I've actually
51:36 Speaker 00 Tell me.
51:38 Chris Williamson? It's the first time I've been able to talk about it since I put a name to it, and it wasn't me to put a name to it, it was Vincent Haranam and William Costello. It's Williamson's Sedation Hypothesis. So,
51:51 Chris Williamson? I noticed in one of your papers that you said, physical violence is rare, a rare but growing problem between 2014, 2018 reactionary incels killed 50 people across North America and Europe. So that's 50 people, too many, shouldn't have happened. One of them in 2020 or 2021 happened on the south coast of England. Almost all of the killings that you do see when it comes to mass shootings that occur in schools, when it comes to jihadist terrorists that come over, they're almost all categorized as incels. However, given the heretofore unforeseen and
52:32 Chris Williamson? unknown levels of sexlessness amongst young men, we definitely should have presumed that we would have had tons and tons more incel killings. Where are all of the killings at is a question that I've been asking myself, and it is my current bro-science belief that men are being sedated out of their status-seeking and sexual frustration behavior with porn and video games. So this is Diana Fleischman's uncanny vulva's theory that she's got about porn, and you can see easily enough what happens with video games. So I saw some data the other week that said nearly a third of unemployed men who are between the ages of 18 and 30 are
53:13 Chris Williamson? spending their time, spending over 2,000 hours per year playing video games. And of that group, there is a huge number that are on either prescription or recreational drugs while they do it. And my point being that if it's true that young male syndrome in 2023 is happening in the same way as it would have done in previously unstable societies, where the sex ratio or the mating market gets messed up, all of these young men, why are they not running around graffitiing stuff and pushing over granny? Like, where are they all? This isn't a call to arms for them to start doing stuff. It is, it is me saying, it's simply not there.
53:56 Chris Williamson? Straight up, I know that you could have,
53:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
53:58 Chris Williamson? It could be like, it could have been diluted down by one tenth. And you would have still seen a significant increase, 2008 to 2018, eight percent to 28% of men having no sex in the last year between the ages of 18 and 30, which is that age that would cause this trouble. And that finishes in 2018. Roll Covid on top of that, roll pathogen risk and increased levels of disgust and blah, blah, blah, social anxiety, all of this. I honestly think it could be over 50% of men walking down the street, maybe 40%. If you pointed a man on the street, a one in two chance that if he's between the ages of 18 and 30, he hasn't had sex in the last year. That is such a huge increase in the state of less than two decades. There should be more of these troubles and there isn't.
54:42 Chris Williamson? And it seems that porn use and video game use are the two easiest outlets for that camaraderie, status seeking, vasopressin, dopamine behaviour. And they're getting some, it's not quite reproductive fitness signals, but it's good enough. It's a, you know, a titrated dose. Williamson's sedation hypothesis.
55:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, look, I really like it. I, I, I think the sedation word is just such a beautiful term in this one, right? And it actually reminds me of some work that I did with this. So I've done a little bit of work with an evolutionary biologist, Mike Kasumovich. And he has looked at violent video games and how they relate to mate value. And whether playing violent video games can give you this kind of boost of making, make, make you feel like you're more of a dude, right? Like you're more of a man, you've got higher mate value. And he actually does find effects consistent with that. But then he also finds these things where if you lose a game, particularly if you lose a video game to a woman and you're a guy, you're super unhappy about it. You're like more aggressive, you're more of a jerk.
55:46 Speaker 00 But if you lose to a man, it's not so bad. I mean, he does a lot of his work on, or a lot of his initial work was actually on spiders and on phenotypic, phenotypic plasticity in spiders and mating dynamics in spiders. But he's a super interesting guy. Now he does some human stuff and he talks about that people are playing violent video games to practise dominance, right? Because they, they're having trouble with dominance in the offline world. So maybe they use the online world to practise dominance. And I think that aligns nicely with your kind of hypothesis. I also think that it would be simplistic to assume that the, and I know that you're not doing this, but it would be simplistic to, for people to think that the only outlet then from that kind of mating disadvantage is societal disruption.
56:30 Speaker 00 So one of the things that has happened over time and over development is we've kind of, our brains have developed, we've found other ways to try and resolve the issues that we face and try and channel those, those kinds of problems into other ways. So I think that there is that ability as well. How you would go about doing that, other than, you know, potentially just complaining to your mates is a really problematic question, right?
56:53 Chris Williamson? You've looked at correlations between local sex ratios and the state of the local mating market and incel activity online misogynistic tweets and then that downstream related into domestic violence or domestic abuse and stuff like that too, right?
57:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And we, so we do find this correlation between offline and online behaviours there. So one of the things we found was that, again, you know, consistent theme, income inequality increases the likelihood of incel ideology. It makes it more prevalent. And we also find that when, when the advantage that men hold over women in terms of how much they earn, so that kind of gender inequality effect, when that gap erodes, so when men and women's earnings become closer and closer, there's more incel ideology there as well.
57:46 Speaker 00 And then in relation to the offline world, one of the things we tracked was the kinds of misogynistic discourse that a lot of incels engage in. And we related that to domestic and family violence outcomes. And we find that there is this predictive relationship where, when an air, when the social media chatter in a particular region becomes more misogynistic, what you find is that you start to see more domestic and family violence in that area. And you even see this predictive effect as well, where if misogyny increases one year, right? Next year, you'll see more domestic and family violence there as well. And that's just a small effect, but these lag effects kind of suggest that one of the things that societies could do, this is a, this is a potential policy area. One of the,
58:31 Speaker 00 one of the things that we could do at a societal level is start to also track sentiment on social media to try and understand and predict where offline behaviour is going to change later. Right. We could track misogyny. We could start to track these, this incel ideology. We could track people's resentment and disgruntlement about the sexes and use that information to then look at some of these more pernicious crimes and, and you know, the outcome of those crimes later on and potentially then divert resources into those areas to try and rectify.
59:03 Chris Williamson? Ahead of time, almost. It's like being able to see the future. So Seth, the guy that wrote, Don't Trust Your Gut, during COVID, during the first wave of COVID, he was able, using aggregated Google search data, he was able to predict where outbreaks were going to occur three to five days before they did with greater accuracy than the CDC. And what he was doing was he was using searches for things like, why can't I smell? Why is my temperature going all over the case? Why can't I taste my food? He had a bunch of different search criteria and sure
59:43 Chris Williamson? enough, it mapped on perfectly. So I'm all down for some, whatever. What was that thing where Tom Cruise was able to see the future? What was that?
59:52 Speaker 00 Minority Report?
59:53 Chris Williamson? Minority Report. Don't want, don't want people arrested before it happens, but you can prepare, you know, compensatory facilities to maybe help people with stuff if you could see things like that. I was talking, I was talking to William Costello before we came on and he has got some stuff from the paper that hasn't even been, been released yet. I thought I would tell you about, he said I'm allowed to talk about it.
1:00:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, great. Love to.
1:00:15 Chris Williamson? Incels have a lower minimum mate preference than non-incels.
1:00:20 Chris Williamson? So this disproves the incels just have too high standards idea that incels have even lower standards than men of their same mate value that are not self identified as incels. So they lower their standards to try and compensate. And the other one, which is really interesting, incels and non incels overestimate the importance that women say they place on financial resources and physical attractiveness, but underestimate kindness, intelligence and humour. So this is what women say. So it's stated, not revealed preferences and the un falsifiability of some areas of the incel ideology might say, well, you know, I know what women like more than women do. And you go, well, I don't know, maybe. But at least in
1:01:02 Chris Williamson? this regard, they overestimated the importance that women said that they placed on it, which becomes a little bit of a self defeating situation, especially if you're a man that is in that poor cohort.
1:01:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, it does. And I think it links to that real nihilistic view that some incels have that they're never going to find any, that black pill ideology of no matter what I do, I'm never going to be able to find a mate. I've always found it really perplexing. And what you've shared there kind of makes sense of that and is consistent with this. I've always found it really perplexing that there's this aspect of incel behaviour that is so preoccupied with how men look, right?
1:01:40 Chris Williamson? LMS, looks, money, status.
1:01:42 Speaker 00 Looks maxing. Right, right. And looks maxing, right? So it's all about looks. And the irony is, you know, when you look at the evolutionary psychology literature, women don't care as much about looks as they do about status. And this is what's made me kind of start to think about, it links back to women's use of beauty, right, as well. I have this, I have this kind of intuition that.
1:02:13 Speaker 00 For both sexes, that what you're doing is trying to gain status in any way that you can, right? And different people have different opportunities available to them. Some people have rich fancy educations they can get and they can flash and other people can have fancy cars and or some people can gain the prestige within their social networks and be very important amongst that social network. But other people don't have those kinds of options available. But what they do have available to them is potentially working on their body. And I think that amongst both sexes, what you may find is that in environments where people don't feel they have many status opportunities available to them, they look at one of the things that they could use to gain status and then they focus on their body and that that might be why you see so much of that amongst incel men as well.
1:02:57 Chris Williamson? Did you see, I don't know whether you follow William, but if you don't, you absolutely need to.
1:03:01 Speaker 00 I do.
1:03:01 Chris Williamson? This was a tweet that he put up last week. This is from PsyPost. Heterosexual women prefer men who are taller and have broader shoulders and consider them more masculine and have better fighting ability. Larger upper bodies boost attractiveness ratings for taller men. They don't appear to have the same effect for shorter men.
1:03:23 Speaker 00 Hmm.
1:03:25 Chris Williamson? Uh, where is it here? According to this study, it didn't have the same effect in improving attractiveness as it did for tall men. However, I think slight muscularity compared to fat, flab, scrawny will give even short men a better chance. I'll tell myself this as I do curls in the mirror. William is a short, a short king. So he, I think he had a personal investment there. However, yeah, I, I don't get it wrong. We were talking about this as we were walking around, me and my housemate were walking around the park the other day, discussing the fact that is it easier for men or women to change their mate value? Was the question in this modern mating world that we've got. Um, and I think I came up
1:04:07 Chris Williamson? with the idea that I think, uh, men are more screwed as a group, but have it better individually. And women are more screwed individually, but have it better as a group at the moment. I think that, um, any one man who.
1:04:23 Chris Williamson? Manages to ramp up their conscientiousness and their motivation for a little bit of time can easily add, you know, any average man can easily add sort of two points on to probably their out of 10 mate value, especially if they haven't cared about it before. A little bit of work on yourself in the gym, some good new clothes, work on career for a couple of years' time, you know, you've started to gain a little bit more income. That's relatively easy. I think that shy of cosmetic surgery, which has some resource limitations on it for women, you are kind of bouncing off an upper bound and you are permanently, from the age of 21, permanently on a downhill slope away from your peak sexual market value for most men, right? This isn't to say that some women don't like bloom and still look great into their 40s
1:05:08 Chris Williamson? and stuff, but you know what I mean. My point being, when it comes to as a group, I don't know how we fix this 19 percentage point or 15 percentage point difference between men and women at universities at the moment, where you've got Title IX was brought in, sorry, Title IX was brought in when women were 15 percentage points behind men and it's now 19 percentage points in the other direction. And I don't know how you fix that. I don't know how you fix the sort of labour force dropouts and stuff for men. Women, I think it is harder for them individually to change their mate value. I think that there are just fewer routes that are open to them. However, if you look as a group, I think
1:05:51 Chris Williamson? women overall have at least a little bit of a brighter future in that both groups are going to be alone for a little while. On average, both groups are going to be increasingly alone, but at least women can be rich and educated while they're alone. So that was my
1:06:05 Speaker 00 That was where you're thinking from?
1:06:06 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
1:06:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, I don't know. Look, I think both sexes have challenges and I don't know if I would say that it would kind of be easier or harder for each sex. Like my devil's advocate view would kind of go, yeah, but as a woman, you could still be an absolute jerk and you could just find a great lipstick and, you know, a dress that was particularly satisfying and some of that kind of slimming underwear and you got a better shot there.
1:06:30 Chris Williamson? Spanx, fix it with Spanx.
1:06:31 Speaker 00 Right, Spanx. And as a guy, it's gonna take a long time to try and earn that kind of big bucks in that economically unequal environment. Like, sure, kindness always helps. So, I don't know. I think both sexes have got disadvantages that we're playing with and both sexes have advantages. And one of the things that you mentioned Earlier was, you know, you think it would be helpful if people would stop being so antagonistic, right? And you know, both sexes could stop viewing the other sex as a problem. And I hundred percent agree with that. And one of the things that I think is actually the access to that is having, and I don't mean this prescriptively, like people should just go out and do this, though that would be good,
1:07:13 Speaker 00 is having a decent understanding of how this kind of evolutionary arms race stuff works, right? At a most basic level, everybody is trying to do the best that they can, right? Everybody has strengths and everybody can be a jerk. Both sexes, both women, both men, you know, both men and women, we can all be absolute jerks and we can all be great and we're both doing the best with every, with what we've got. And I, I don't know, this might be my, I might be, this might be my life coaching background kind of getting in the way there. But I think the access to not demonizing the other sex is understanding that you can be a real jerk as well.
1:07:53 Speaker 00 It's okay. Like it, it's, if you can kind of look yourself in the mirror and know that you can be a total jerk and that doesn't mean that you are a total jerk, right? It just means that you can have those qualities and you can also let those qualities go and so can other people. I, I think that's a real access to not making it the other sex's problem.
1:08:12 Chris Williamson? It's very moralistic, very, very, it's you are this thing, not you do this thing. Not you behave in a particular way, it's you are this thing. It's like infused your spirit, you fucking unlovable harpies or you like awful neck bearded incels or whatever it is, right? That's the way that this gets framed. And this is, I mean, this is my current pet obsession. It's what I'm writing about most mornings. It's, and also given that I'm coming into this world of, you know, gender dynamics, sex market imbalance, whatever, uh, on YouTube, which if you are talking about this and you're a guy that looks like me, you're spouting off about how women are these sort of awful.
1:08:58 Chris Williamson? Coddled pieces of shit who have absolutely no idea about what their mate value is. And although there are some kernels of truth to like the fundamental basis, it is taken and blown up to such a degree that I think it's actually a net negative to this discussion because it makes people, both men and women, think that they have an understanding about what these evolutionary precepts are, and it's wrong. So not only do you no longer have the learner's mind, which is great for keeping you open to new things, you're closed off to any new evidence because you already have your ideology, which has come out of whatever corner of the internet you believe is already right. But now you're still dealing with the same problems and not prepared to make any changes. So yeah, I think tuning down that adversarial relationship. And I see,
1:09:43 Chris Williamson? you know, this isn't just the stuff that comes from guys like r/female dating strategy. The pernicious thing about the advice for women is that it comes from more mainstream
1:09:55 Chris Williamson? outlets.
1:09:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, magazines.
1:09:57 Chris Williamson? Yeah, it's real shit. At least guys, if guys want to get shit advice, they've got to go on the internet. If girls want to get shit advice, they just need to go to the newsagent. Because Elle and Cosmopolitan will happily write articles teaching women how to sleep with him and not catch feelings. Hang on, your article is teaching women how to disembodied themselves from letting another person inside of them so that they can, what, claim that that's freedom? That doesn't sound particularly free to me. So that, that is definitely for women, they have that much worse. I think that the mainstream dating advice for women and, and
1:10:39 Chris Williamson? men is bad, but men, it's not harmful. Men, it's just useless. Like women, it's genuinely harmful. Yeah, it makes, it, stopping reading Cosmopolitan and Elle and stuff like that, I think would make, would make the world a better place. Final thing, final thing, you used to do gender studies.
1:10:58 Speaker 00 I did, yeah.
1:10:59 Chris Williamson? How do you go from doing gender studies to being an evolutionary psychology scholar?
1:11:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, look, for me, it was a.
1:11:12 Speaker 00 I think for me, so there's one thing, I've always been open minded, right? I'm a pretty open minded individual and I did gender studies because I was really passionate about gender issues and was that keen on figuring them out. Um, and then I worked as a life coach and business coach for a bit and then I decided to start doing psych and um, I didn't even know evolutionary psychology existed when I started doing my undergrad in psych. Um, and I started to, you know, in the first week of my PhD, I went to a summer school and it was run by the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists. And in this summer school, um, I sat in a workshop in evolutionary psychology.
1:11:54 Speaker 00 And, you know, I'm sitting there and I'm super excited to be there and I'm listening to the presenter start talking about sexual conflict. I'm like, okay, yeah, this is right down my alley. I love this stuff. And then he started talking about the evolutionary reasons of why we have such common patriarchal backgrounds to so many different cultures. And then he started talking about mate value and pressures on appearance. And I sat in this workshop and I was flabbergasted, right? And after being flabbergasted, I then started to feel really pissed off. And I was pissed off not because there was this whole framework that i- in biology to understand what I was so committed by.
1:12:39 Speaker 00 I was pissed off that I'd spent an entire gender studies degree looking at it and no one had told me about it. I was like, I was not doing gender studies to be kind of pigeonholed into only looking at one framework to try and solve this issue. I was committed to trying to rectify sexual politics and make a difference to sexual harmony. I don't care what framework you throw at me. If the framework's going to make a difference, I want to hear about it. Um, and it got me really riled up. And um, in, in kind of presenting it that way, it makes it sound like I think that the problem's only in gender studies and that only gender studies is closed to other views. And I don't think that. Um, I think that. Both biological camps and sociocultural camps can be closed to alternative views. And my kind of
1:13:26 Speaker 00 flag in the ground from that point onwards was that I was always going to find a way to combine nature nurture frameworks that in the topics I cared about, you had to do both. And I've really just made it my business to do both ever since. And it's, I, I find it really satisfying. I mean, it's challenging because you kind of sit in this crossroads where you're kind of not really part of either camp. And you are a little bit, but then they always judge whether you're really part of the camp in the right ways. But that crossroads works for me, you know, I tend to be a little more controversial. Um, I don't mind sitting at the crossroads and, and I think ultimately at a values level, I really authentically believe you've got to be accounting for both biology and culture. And really, if you truly understand biology, you know that culture is part of the biology.
1:14:11 Speaker 00 Um, so yeah, I, I sit in both worlds.
1:14:15 Chris Williamson? What do you think most gender studies scholars misunderstand about human nature?
1:14:23 Speaker 00 I think that they, um, I think that they misunderstand how plastic everything is. Um, and that, and what I mean by that is how responsive we are to what's going on in the environment. I think that they believe that, um, culture can be separated from biology. Um, and I think they believe that,
1:14:48 Speaker 00 I don't think they understand really what an arms race is, you know? I mean, I'm sure they could define it, right? But I don't think they really understand how that plays out and how people are battling for, uh, doing well and flourishing in the environment that they're in. And they're going to use the tools available to them and, and
1:15:09 Chris Williamson? Do you think that's, I, from what I hear about coming out of gender studies camps, there is a good bit of adversarial sort of arms racey type language. Is that misguided? Am I reading it wrong?
1:15:24 Speaker 00 Um.
1:15:26 Speaker 00 I don't know if I would say you're reading it wrong, but I think that the, I think that that my take of that world is it can be kind of very wrapped up in victims and persecutors. You know, there's no, it's kind of one directional. There's either the, there is the group that is doing
1:15:48 Speaker 00 bad things to the other group, right? And then that group is
1:15:51 Chris Williamson? There's oppressors and depressed.
1:15:52 Speaker 00 Exactly. Yes. Thank you. Much more eloquently said. And, and I, so I think they get kind of wrapped up in that narrative. And then I think there can be a tendency to ignore the fact that an individual within a oppressor group does not mean that they are necessarily having a better life situation, right? So much more important than being in the oppressor or the oppressed group, or in, let's say, the male or the female group, much more important than which group you're in is your position as an individual. I think that, you know, and evolutionary biology has shown to us that individuals do not act in the best interests of their group.
1:16:36 Speaker 00 They act in the best interests of themselves. And that is one of the kind of core misconceptions and one of the insights that I think would make the biggest difference to these socio-cultural explanations.
1:16:47 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I mean, the idea that because of your sex or race or country of birth or whatever it might be, that you are inherently having a better time. Like, if, if I had the choice between being a middle-class black guy or a super working-class white guy, like, I know which one I'm going to take. And no one ever really wants to talk about class, especially coming from the UK, and people in America don't really understand this. I don't know what Australia's class system or lack is thereof is, is like, but the UK is still so class-based. I think it's because we're just so old, right? It's inculcated in the postcode that you live in, in the, the streets that you're on. It's, it's, it's everything. And, um.
1:17:31 Chris Williamson? Yeah, coming from somewhere that is so class dominant.
1:17:38 Chris Williamson? There was a really good article, a really good hiring drive by a bank a couple of years ago that said, rather than it being, we're going to arbitrarily pick some like ethnic or sex group and we're going to have this amount of this many people. They decided that they were going to pick, I think it was 30% of managers by this particular year were going to be from a working class background. And I thought, that's a cool policy because that cuts across the board, right? Doesn't discriminate based on race, sex, anything. So there we go. Anyway, Candice Blake, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go?
1:18:19 Speaker 00 Follow me on Twitter. I talk about the work a lot there and the newspapers there a lot. Or go to our lab website at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. You can just Google Evolution Lab and you'll come right across us.
1:18:31 Chris Williamson? Candice, I appreciate you. Thank you.
1:18:33 Speaker 00 Thanks very much, Chris.
1:18:34 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
1:18:45 Speaker 03 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
1:18:51 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.
1:18:55 Speaker 03 With great power comes great deniability.
1:18:58 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
1:19:00 Speaker 03 Digger, see the trail online, only in years, October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.
Previous Are Smart People Actually Happier? - Adam Mastroianni Next 19 Of Human Behaviour's Weirdest Quirks - Rory Sutherland - #587 Page updated October 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
